Some community leaders want San Diego to spur more housing construction downtown by eliminating or softening requirements that projects include expensive underground parking.

They say major cities such as New York and San Francisco abandoned such requirements long ago, and that the timing is ideal with decreasing reliance on cars downtown thanks to ride-sharing services, scooters and a free shuttle.

The electric open-air shuttles, launched by the city two years ago, have joined with app-rented...

Critics say, however, that San Diego’s downtown lacks the comprehensive mass transit and urban density needed to allow construction of housing without parking spots for residents, who still typically use cars as their primary means of transportation.

They also note that even if San Diego softened or eliminated parking requirements for downtown projects, developers would continue to build underground parking in most cases because many people moving downtown still want a dedicated parking spot.

Leaders of San Diego’s downtown development agency, Civic San Diego, told members of the Urban Land Institute this month that they are exploring the pros and cons of softening or eliminating parking requirements.

“Downtown is a prime area for experimentation – kind of a lab for how you deal with parking issues and mobility issues,” said Brad Richter, Civic’s vice president of planning. “Off-street parking is very expensive to build, especially downtown.”

Richter said off-street parking spots range in cost from $40,000 to $75,000, so the nearly 5,000 housing units now under construction downtown will include between $200 million and $375 million worth of parking spots.

"That's a huge investment," Richter told the land institute members during a lunchtime meeting at Civic San Diego headquarters. "You can just think about where that money could be spent otherwise."

Softer parking requirements have been championed by Circulate San Diego, an advocacy group for pedestrians, transit and cycling.

"San Diego is one of the few remaining cities in the United States that has a downtown that doesn't have any section that is free from parking minimums," Colin Parent, Circulate’s executive director, said during the lunch meeting. "So we're an outlier now. We didn't used to be, but we are."

“Parking is a major cost driver," Parent said. "When you add costs to something, you see less of it."

He said the many people who don’t want to rely on a car, or who can’t drive one because of their age or a disability, shouldn’t have to pay higher housing prices because some people still drive cars.

"We shouldn't require every development to have all the amenities that everyone would want," he said. "There needs to be a diversity of options. I think there's an opportunity to start thinking about things differently."

Richter said, however, that initial discussions with developers have not been promising.

"As we've encouraged developers to look at reducing their parking from our minimums, we've had some pushback quite honestly," he said.

Developers of small projects, where parking is often prohibitively expensive, have embraced the idea far more enthusiastically than developers of larger projects, Richter said.

"The small-lot developers are welcoming that and are looking at ways to reduce or eliminate parking, but on bigger developments the developers are telling us they can't get financing with less than what our parking requirements are," he said.

In addition, many are worried about being one of the only projects that doesn’t include parking when most other downtown projects do, Richter said.

"They're worried about the market competition if they're the only developer providing less parking," he said.

Pat Stark, chairman of the Downtown Community Planning Council, said softening the requirements could also create a backlash from many of the 40,000 residents already living downtown.

"We're very friendly toward density, but then there's also great pushback on the impacts of that density, specifically when it comes to parking," Stark said during the luncheon.

Gary Smith, president of the Downtown San Diego Residents Group, said by phone on Friday that San Diego is not ready to abandon parking requirements downtown.

"We're not ready today and we're not sure when tomorrow is," Smith said. “In the long term, you will probably end up going that way because people living in a dense civic core like downtown tend to find they don't need a car as much, but it's not at the tipping point yet."

Smith said two key problems are the city’s relative lack of mass transit and density compared to New York and San Francisco.

In addition, San Diego’s downtown has 40,000 residents and is slated to climb to about 100,000 at buildout, while Manhattan has 1.7 million residents and San Francisco has nearly 1 million.

Smith said the relatively small population matters because it prevents San Diego from having all of the amenities and services downtown that would be necessary for residents to give up their cars.

"When you get enough density, all the services come to you -- all those things that respond to the density because they have enough traffic to be successful,” he said.

Smith said the city is already experimenting with not requiring parking, noting that five small projects totaling 300 units have been approved recently in downtown.

He said local residents agreed to exemptions for such projects in a 2006 update to downtown’s growth blueprint, which is called a community plan, because the redevelopment of older sites would not have been financially feasible if developers had to include parking.

Parent, the Circulate San Diego official, said city officials should consider changing the parking requirements despite the potential challenges.

"If you take away that government obligation, it frees up the market and the developers to try to experiment," he said. "Everyone understands the politics that downtown is different and unique, and so the rules around parking, among other things, in downtown can and should be different than other places."

Civic San Diego officials said they are eager to see the results of an ongoing, city-led study of the effects of parking regulations in transit areas across the city, not just downtown.